This article discusses the power of individual consumer voice online and how it destroyed a heritage brand like Maggi in India.
Read moreHandling Crisis Communication On Social Media - What We Can Learn From The Germanwings Case
How to handle crisis communication on social media? See what we can learn from the Germanwings case and how to effectively use social media for crisis communication.
Read more5 ways to handle a social media crisis for marketing managers - A case study of Samsung
Handling a social media crisis is a challenge and a confusing task for marketing managers due to the consumers’ empowerment. There are 5 ways to manage the crisis in order to save your brands reputation.
Read moreOnline word-of-mouth and its key characteristics to manage it effectively
Online or electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has been defined as “any positive or negative statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company, which is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the Internet” (Hennig-Thurau, Gwinner, Walsh & Gremler, 2004, p. 39). Moreover, eWOM also includes opinions and share of information not only about products but also about services and brands (Jalilvand, Esfahani, & Samiei, 2011). In this post I will address the question: what are key characteristics of eWOM that companies need to know in order to manage it effectively?
Read moreSocial Media Monitoring – 3 reasons why companies should do it Part 1
With almost three billion users in 2013, the number of people using the internet is enormous (ICC, n.d.). But what are all these people doing while they are online? Of course, the answer to this question depends on demographic characteristics, such as age and gender, but Social Media is certainly among the top online destinations. A research conducted by wearesocial.net in 2014 showed that in the beginning of that year, European internet user spend on average 40% of their total online time on Social Media, which accounts for up to two hours per day in some countries (Kemp, 2014).
Read moreYour Brand under Attack: Negative electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) and online Firestorms in Social Media Part 2
Although the importance of this topic seems to be extremely high, research is still in its infancy. There is a wide variety of academic articles available that describe the changing paradigm of word-of-mouth, yet there is only limited literature available that examines how brands can deal with negative electronic word-of-mouth and online firestorms within the social media context. This may be connected to the fact that its emergence, its development and its consequences happened in a rather short period of time. However, from popular press articles, Thomas et al. (2012) gathered and analyzed a variety of company examples. Thereby, they identified five general coping strategies, delay, respond, partner, legal action, and censorship, which will be illustrated with cases below.
Read moreYour Brand under Attack: Negative electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) and online Firestorms in Social Media Part 1
In 2012, just 39 cents were enough to trigger an ‘online firestorm’ that broke over McDonald's Germany. What happened was that the leading fast-food brand had raised the price of its cheeseburger by exactly that amount. As a consequence, many consumers expressed their unhappiness about the price increase by communicating their displeasure on McDonald’s Facebook wall (Frickel, 2012). This in itself does not seem to be unusual within the highly-connected online world in which many companies manage their own social media presences and respond to or interact with consumers. However, it becomes unusual if the number of ‘likes’ and comments on one critical social media comment rise to exorbitant levels. Within 48 hours 81,000 users clicked on the ‘like’-button and 6,800 users commented. The company responded one day later and announced that the price for the cheeseburger would not be raised in most restaurants (Frickel, 2012).
Read moreHow Brands Should Deal with a Social Media Crisis. United Airlines case
With the huge rise of Social Media over the last decade, a new era has begun in the web environment. The presence of social media such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter etc have utterly changed the online scene for brand managers and marketers (Fournier & Avery, 2011). Billions of people were now connected and were able to express their thoughts, write articles, share images and videos.
Social media brought the world closer by providing a platform where everyone and from everywhere could join. Just to take a picture and understand the massive size of social media; Facebook statistics in 2014, showed that their monthly active users are 1.39 billion people, while Youtube users account for more than 1 billion as well (Facebook, 2015; Youtube, 2015).
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